


Buds and Bells and Stars without a Name

by starfishstar



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Community: holmestice, Eventual Sherlock/Lestrade, Gen, M/M, Mycroft also gets a cameo in this world of course he does, Sherlock being Sherlock in any universe, Sherstrade, can also be read as mostly gen, dangerous mythical beasts, playing fast and loose with classical mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 13:09:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5376356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfishstar/pseuds/starfishstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where Greg could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat.</p><p>…In which Greg Lestrade has lunch in a city garden, and gets way more than he bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [biswholocked](https://archiveofourown.org/users/biswholocked/gifts).



> Written for the Holmestice Exchange, Winter 2015...
> 
> Dear biswholocked, goodness, this has been fun! You asked for fantasy or magical realism or Sherlock as some kind of supernatural/fae/magical being, emotional exploration between characters, some danger, possibly casefic, and Sherlock/Lestrade… I threw all that together and it went in strange directions. I hope you enjoy this! 
> 
> Thank you to the wonderful thesmallhobbit for such a fast, helpful beta at short notice! Phrases you recognise, dear reader, are either drawn from Arthur Conan Doyle himself (namely Holmes’ descriptions of Moriarty in “The Final Problem”) or BBC canon (thank you to arianedevere for your amazing dialogue file).
> 
> Story takes place pre-canon in a slightly alternate universe.

The day Greg Lestrade thought he saw a tree move – thought he saw, specifically, an unusually slim oak that stood out amidst the plane trees of Christchurch Gardens shift a graceful foot or so to the left – he performed a quick mental run through the relative probability that a) he was going mad or b) he’d had at least two cups more coffee than were really advisable when it was only barely past noon.  
  
The coffee, yes, that explained it. Just another sign that he really ought to cut back.  
  
Greg glanced down and took another bite of his bacon sandwich. He’d allotted himself ten minutes to catch an all too rare whiff of fresh air and sunshine before he needed to be back at his desk to take yet another disheartening pass through the evidence – or lack thereof – in the Regent’s Park Robber case.  
  
Damn that case. Generating so much paperwork and yet so few leads. Or no leads at all, to be precise.  
  
When Greg looked up again, where he could have sworn an oak tree had stood a moment before, with spring sunlight speckling its lithe branches, there was now instead a very posh man in a long, dark coat, lounging on the nearest bench as if he’d been there all day.  
  
Greg stared.  
  
“Hello,” the man said. He had an odd way of blinking not at all, then blinking several times in quick succession. The force of that pale-eyed gaze fixed on Greg made him feel as if he were being observed by some alien entity, something not exactly human.  
  
Greg’s mental tally added one tick mark to the _“really maybe actually going mad after all”_ column.  
  
“Hello,” Greg said, because though he might be going mad, still that wasn’t any excuse to be rude.  
  
“It’s a…nice day,” the man said, as if he were dredging the phrase up from a small-talk instructional manual he’d once read. “The…weather. Is nice, isn’t it?” He vaguely waved one elegant hand, as if to encompass all the weather currently existing around them.  
  
“Yeah,” Greg said, because damn it, he was too British not to answer when a question was put to him directly. “Finally a bit of sun. Does a person good.”  
  
“Indeed.” Again, the man blinked in that odd way. “Anyway,” he said, with an air of being able to dispense at last with the necessary but tedious chitchat and arrive at the real point of the conversation. “You’re going about it all wrong with that serial robbery case. You’re looking for a man, yes? And you’ve built up a profile of what you think he must be like: tall enough to attack a person from above and behind, athletic and able to cover open ground quickly, opportunist who strikes when a victim is alone, possible psychological components of thrill-seeking behaviour, etcetera, etcetera. Dull!”  
  
Greg felt his jaw drop further and further as the stranger delivered this extraordinary speech in rapid-fire delivery.  
  
“Hang on!” Greg protested, his sandwich slipping unheeded back into the wax paper wrappings that lay open on his lap, bacon grease spattering his trousers. “How can you possibly know any of that? We haven’t released details to the press, and there’ve been no eyewitnesses. So how could you know any of that?”  
  
The man heaved a long-suffering sigh and muttered something under his breath that sounded very much like, “Oh, _tedious_.”  
  
Greg tensed, mentally assessing whether or not he could take this man down if he moved fast and used the element of surprise to his advantage. Was this their serial robber himself, upping the adrenalin thrill by confessing to the police and seeing if he could get away with it?  
  
“You should be _looking_ ,” the man said, with the pseudo-patient air of a person speaking to a small child, “for an attack from the air. These are crimes of opportunity, not motive. The victims are those careless enough to be walking through the park holding mobile phones or other valuables in such a way that they are visible from above. If you send out an undercover police officer carrying a mobile or some other shiny object above his or her head, I guarantee you will catch your ‘criminal’.”  
  
“That’s…absurd,” Greg said weakly.  
  
The man flowed to his feet in a flouncing of dramatic, dark coat. “Absurd, certainly. It’s up to you whether you decide to take my advice even so. Good day, Detective Inspector.”  
  
And he was gone, in the time it took Greg to blink.  
  
Greg looked down at his half-eaten sandwich, at the tiny splatters of grease dotting the previously pristine grey of his trousers, and said, “Oh, bugger.”  
  
~ ~ ~  
  
Friday at last, and no cases so urgent that they threatened to swallow another weekend whole. Greg just needed to make it through a last hour’s worth of paperwork, then he could call it a night and go home.  
  
First, though, he would step outside for a well-deserved smoke. Just one.  
  
He went out the side entrance, where there was slightly less chance that one of his subordinates would see him and disapprove. Christ, bad enough to have to set a good example for the public; more and more Greg felt the pressure to be a role model for his team as well. Just another fringe benefit of being a DI.  
  
Greg stepped out to the pavement and leaned against the ugly grey barrier that separated the building from the street. He propped a cigarette between his lips, fumbled in his pocket for a lighter, then lit up and took a first grateful drag, relishing the sting as the smoke hit his lungs. Terrible habit and he would quit sooner or later, but for the moment, how satisfying.  
  
He clicked the lighter closed and dropped it back into his jacket pocket. Then snapped his head up, because he wasn’t a cop for nothing – Greg could feel it when someone stepped in near him, just out of his line of sight. He glanced sharply to his right.  
  
It was the same bloke from the gardens the other day. Same long, dark coat, same strange, pale eyes. And Christ, he was tall.  
  
“Inspector,” the man rumbled. Greg was struck now by how deep his voice was, a low baritone, rich and somehow…ancient.  
  
_Ancient_? Where had that fanciful word choice come from? Greg shook his head and chalked it up to the mental effects of overwork. It was Friday, just one more hour to go. He would have his fag, he would make polite and wary conversation with this man and simultaneously use the time to decide whether or not he needed to bring the man in for official questioning, then he would do his paperwork and go home.  
  
The man slid a cigarette from the depths of one of the pockets in that dramatic coat. Automatically, Greg fished his lighter out again and offered it. The man smirked for a fraction of a second, then leaned his head obligingly closer and allowed Greg to light his cigarette for him. Smug bastard.  
  
The man inhaled, and exhaled a plume of smoke in a dramatic arc towards the greyish sky. He commented, “I’m told I ought not to smoke these. They’re bad for my –” He blinked several times, rapidly, as if he couldn’t find the word he was looking for. Then he offered, as if he still weren’t quite certain he’d got the right term, “Lungs?”  
  
Greg laughed despite himself. He was meant to be finding this bloke suspicious, not charming. “Yes, your lungs,” he said. “They’re terrible for your lungs and I’m going to switch to patches just as soon as I get a second free to think, which hasn’t happened yet this year. So, come on, how did you know our robbery suspect would turn out to be a bloody literal _bird_?”  
  
“Was it a bird?” The man exhaled again, leaning back against the barrier as if he hadn’t a care in the world – as if he weren’t the one who’d tracked Greg down specifically to tip him off about this.  
  
“Oh, come off it, of course it was. Like you said it would be. Bloody great thing flapping down out of the sky and knocking people about with its wings, stealing whatever shiny bits and bobs had caught its eye. We didn’t catch the thing, but we caught a glimpse of it. Of course it was a bird – what else would it be?”  
  
“If you say so.”  
  
All right, so the man intended to be difficult about it. “And you still haven’t answered my question.”  
  
“Which was…?”  
  
“How’d you know? There were no witnesses to any of the attacks, so I know you weren’t there to see it.”  
  
“What would you say if I told you that yes, in fact, I was there?”  
  
“Couldn’t’ve been. There were no eyewitnesses. DS Melas made sure of that before she set up the sting – just the way you suggested, I might add.”  
  
“I was there, Detective Inspector. I have ways of not being noticed.”  
  
Greg inhaled wrong at just that moment, and his guffaw of disbelief turned into a hacking cough. The pale-eyed man watched him with faint alarm.  
  
When Greg could breathe again, he snorted, “You are too bloody good to be believed. ‘I have ways of not being noticed’? What are you, straight out of a pulp fiction crime thriller?”  
  
The man narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to assess whether Greg was making fun of him – which, frankly, shouldn’t have been all that difficult to figure out.  
  
“No, I’ve got it,” Greg went on, giving the man a sly, sidelong glance. “You’re some kind of magical being, right? You can turn yourself invisible? Or is it that you’re a superhero and your special ability is being able to fly?”  
  
“None of the above,” the man said, quite huffy now. “I assure you I am corporeal, visible and entirely land-bound.”  
  
Greg’s laughter ended on a last, surprised cough, because the man was serious. Greg was good at reading people, and the man in front of him wasn’t joking. In fact, Greg doubted he even knew how to tell a joke.  
  
“Right, mate, sorry,” he said. “You’re corporeal, visible and land-bound, yeah, got it.”  
  
“Yes,” the man said coolly. “And in any case, you’ve interviewed the wrong suspect, in that fraud case that’s worrying at the back of your mind even now, here on your alleged break. He’s not your man. But he has information on the real culprit, and he’ll crack if you put a little more pressure on him. Start by digging into his alibi.”  
  
All nonchalance, the man dropped his barely-smoked cigarette to the pavement and crushed it neatly under the sole of one sleek black dress shoe.  
  
“I’ll be going,” he said, and then indeed he was gone, disappearing so fast that Greg hardly had time to register which direction he’d taken.  
  
Greg’s own half-finished cigarette dangled forgotten from his fingers. The suspect they’d interviewed today…the suspect who would now have to be re-interrogated, but first Greg was going to need to thoroughly re-research that seemingly airtight alibi. Because the mystery man in the long coat might or might not turn out to be right, but Greg couldn’t chance the possibility of missing out on a lead just because it had been handed to him by a nameless stranger in a posh coat who didn’t mind wasting most of a perfectly good cigarette for the sake of a dramatic exit.  
  
Damn. There went his weekend.  
  
~ ~ ~  
  
Far too late on Saturday evening, exhausted but feeling he ought to celebrate a case finally finished and finished well – the mystery man’s lead had indeed proved invaluable – Greg pushed open the door of the grungy pub that hunkered behind a narrow shop front around the corner from his flat.  
  
The place was grimy, with a bar permanently sticky with spilled beer, but it was close to home and an extremely unlikely place to run into any of his colleagues. Greg liked his colleagues fine, but just at the moment he felt he’d spent enough of his time with them for one weekend.  
  
He ordered a pint and slumped down onto a barstool with a sigh, remembering as always not to let his hands actually touch the grubby, beer-drenched bar. He took a long pull on his drink and closed his eyes for a short, welcome moment. What a week.  
  
When Greg opened his eyes, there was a man sitting on the next barstool.  
  
Bespoke suit in a rich charcoal hue with subtle pinstripes, thinning but painfully correct hair, and the slim line of a black umbrella balanced neatly against his thigh. A very posh man, though not the _same_ posh man as usual. For one incoherent moment, Greg thought, _For god’s sake, am I attracting all of them now?_  
  
The man cast a brief but thorough glance over Greg, then summoned the barman with a precise flick of his fingers. He ordered the most expensive whisky in the place – no surprise there. Then he turned to Greg.  
  
“What is your interest in Sherlock Holmes?”  
  
“Sorry, _who_?” Greg demanded, the words coming out more belligerently than he’d intended. It had been a very trying week.  
  
The stranger gave an extraordinarily put-upon sigh, far more than Greg felt his question warranted. The man gazed doubtfully at the whisky glass in his hand, raised it to his lips and took a small exploratory sip. Then he set the glass very precisely back on the bar, grimaced at it and murmured under his breath, “That’s what I get, I suppose.”  
  
Greg politely stifled an incredulous cough and took a sip of his own cheap bitter.  
  
Returning his steely gaze to Greg, the posh man said, “I take it he’s neglected to introduce himself, then. _So_ like him.”  
  
“Sorry, who are we talking about here?” Greg asked, though he thought he could hazard a guess.  
  
The posh man raised his elegant eyebrows. “Surely you’re not that obtuse, Detective Inspector? Dark hair, long coat, an unfortunate tendency towards dramatics.”  
  
“Can think of at least one bloke who fits that bill,” Greg muttered. The stranger’s eyebrows climbed higher.  
  
“Yes, _well_ ,” the man said. “I hope we have at least established that you are acquainted with the man of whom I speak.”  
  
It took Greg a moment to realise that had been a question. He slurped another slug of his beer, wondering if getting drunker would make this conversation more or less surreal. “Yeah, all right, I know – Sherlock. If you can call it ‘knowing’ a person when he turns up out of the blue, blurts out alarmingly accurate information about cases I’m working that incidentally there should be no possible way for him to know, then bloody disappears before I can find out where he’s getting his information from.”  
  
“You needn’t worry about that, Detective Inspector Lestrade. He has his ways, but they are in no way criminal, so you may set your mind to rest on that point.”  
  
“And I should believe that just because _you_ said so?” Greg demanded incredulously. “You, the man who’s tracked me down to where I live, knows my name and rank, and seems to possess some mysterious yet unexplained connection to some other mysterious and unexplained bloke, who’s _also_ stalking me and whose name I didn’t even know until just now?”  
  
The man, who was gaining Greg’s grudging respect for unflappability if nothing else, ignored this entirely. “Returning to the salient point,” he said. “What is your interest in Sherlock Holmes?”  
  
“I _don’t_ have an interest in him!” Greg burst out. The barman’s head snapped up from where he was serving a trio of young women at the other end of the bar, and Greg grimaced in apology. More quietly, he repeated, “I don’t have an interest in him. How can I have an interest in someone I only know because he shows up outside my workplace at random intervals like some very bizarre overgrown cat?”  
  
“Hm,” the man said, which wasn’t an answer. “It’s true, he isn’t very good yet at the social niceties. You must forgive him, he's only been alive several hundred years, he's not really got ‘the hang of it’ yet, as I believe people are wont to say.”  
  
Greg stared at him. Staring seemed like a good response. “Sorry, did you just say –”  
  
“Oh, has he not explained that either?” the man sighed. “Well, not my secret to reveal. All in good time, I suppose. Do forget I said anything, Detective Inspector.” He frowned down at the glass of stupidly expensive whisky in front of him, then lifted it and downed it in one go. The frown deepened as he set the glass neatly back on the bar. “Still, I would be grateful if you would keep an eye on him, should your paths cross again in the course of your duties. He’s not nearly as invincible as he likes to think, and I worry about him a great deal.”  
  
“What –” Greg began, not even sure yet what he was going to ask. This man’s mere presence gave rise to so many questions.  
  
Before he could get another word out, the man had risen in a swirl of tailored suit and posh umbrella, and was out the door of the pub and gone.  
  
“Oh, bloody hell,” Greg muttered, as the barman cast him an extremely curious glance. “Didn’t get that one’s name either.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Oh, damn,” said Sergeant Sally Donovan, then looked chagrined when Greg glanced up at her from his desk. She was flipping through the pages of a printout she held in one hand and had halted just inside his doorway as something in the pages caught her attention. “Sorry, sir. It’s just, there’s been another pet disappearance in Hampstead Heath.”  
  
“A missing _pet_? And this is our division why?”  
  
Donovan bit her lip. She was newly promoted to sergeant and eager to prove herself, torn between wanting to please her superiors and wanting to follow her own generally solid instincts. “It’s not, exactly. But, see, if you’ll look here –”  
  
She hurried over to his desk and set the pages neatly in front of him, pointing out specific sentences and flipping pages as she spoke.  
  
“See, it’s been a regular pattern, every couple of weeks. A dog that got out from a back garden. A pair of housecats that wandered off from a residential street nearby and never returned. Another dog that was let off the lead to play, ran after a stick and never came back. Then yesterday, a dog disappeared _as_ the owner was walking it, she turned her back for a moment and it was gone. And these were all in or around Hampstead Heath.”  
  
Greg followed her pointing finger, and ruffled a distracted hand through his hair. “And why does this qualify as a crime?”  
  
“You’re going to laugh, sir – don’t laugh – but the pattern, the timing of it, doesn’t seem like chance. It seems like – like something more sinister might be going on.” She pressed her lips together and averted her eyes, like she expected him to burst out laughing.  
  
Greg didn’t laugh, but he did give Donovan’s concerned face thoughtful consideration. All logic said he should gently but firmly remind her that they were here to solve major crimes, that this was by no stretch of the imagination a major crime, and that there were half a dozen more important things she could be doing with her time right this very minute.  
  
Why, then, was something in his gut firmly insisting that this sounded like a case his mysterious pale-eyed acquaintance might have something to say about?  
  
“All right,” he sighed, giving in to gut feeling rather than sense. Because Greg, too, knew himself to have instincts that generally proved to be solid. “I’ll pop over there after work and have a look around.”  
  
“You – you will?” Even though she’d been the one to suggest it, Donovan looked like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.  
  
“Yeah. Can’t promise to turn anything up, but I’ll have a look.”  
  
It was absurd, of course, to think he was going to discover any evidence of this theorised dog-napper just by taking a brief evening jaunt through some small subsection of a park that stretched across 320 hectares. But then, how much of his life lately had made sense? It would do him good to stretch his legs, if nothing else. He spent too much time these days behind a desk.  
  
Greg nodded at Donovan, kept the file she’d brought him, and shooed her back to work.  
  
~ ~ ~  
  
Greg parked his car and strolled into the park, feeling faintly ridiculous. Thanks to the long daylight hours of early summer, the sun was still bright behind the trees, and ambling couples were enjoying the evening light as Greg crossed a wide grassy area near the park’s southernmost edge. What exactly was he expecting to find here, aside from picnickers and, from the sound of it, a casual game of cricket taking place beyond the next stand of trees?  
  
Shaking his head at himself but unable to set aside the dogged need to run down every hunch, no matter how mundane or bizarre, Greg started along an alley of lime trees. The evening light filtered gently through the green canopy overhead. Peaceful, certainly. Not the sort of place you would expect pets to go tragically missing.  
  
Once again, Greg ran through the possibilities in his head, as he made his way along the gravel path.  
  
Possibility number one: These were simple instances of lost pets, and Donovan was reading in a correlation where there wasn’t one. Happened all the time; the human brain sought pattern and meaning as a way of making a chaotic world make sense.  
  
Or the other possibility, that there _was_ a pattern, which meant – what? A nefarious dog-napper, lurking amongst the trees, stealing away people’s beloved pets to some unknown ends? Or could it be an animal, something big enough to eat a medium-sized dog? _Right, Greg, the old ‘lion escaped from the zoo’. That sounds like a likely first hypothesis._ He snorted aloud.  
  
A leaf dropped from the trees above, straight down in front of Greg’s nose – not a gentle drift downwards, but a determined fall. Greg blinked and stopped walking. Curiosity getting the better of him, he bent and picked up the leaf, which was a lovely bright green. It was a perfectly formed specimen, round at the sides but tapering to a gentle point, with serrated edges and symmetrical veins highly visible as the slanting light shone through its semi-opaque shape.  
  
There was also writing on it.  
  
Some pale liquid had been used to scratch out words in an uneven hand on the leaf’s surface. The substance wasn’t anything Greg recognised, and appeared to still be wet. It read:  
  
_Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why._  
  
Greg stared at the thing in his hand, then looked hard at the canopy of green above him. No one there of course, just tree branches swaying gently in the breeze.  
  
Holding the leaf very carefully by its edges so the writing wouldn’t smudge, Greg searched the area, working outwards in concentric circles from the place where the leaf had fallen, but he found nothing, no human presence. No animal presence either, not even a mouse or squirrel scrabbling in the underbrush. In fact, now that he thought about it, this bit of the park seemed unnaturally still, as if it were holding its breath in the face of some malevolent presence.  
  
Greg shook his head, annoyed at himself for indulging in another absurd flight of fancy. There was a rational explanation here, there had to be – he just hadn’t hit upon yet. The leaf had shaken loose from…a nearby art installation, perhaps. Yes, it had blown in from somewhere and got caught in the trees, only to be shaken loose again as Greg happened to be passing underneath. Or something.  
  
The fact that the words on the leaf referenced a missing dog, precisely the thing he’d come here to investigate, was surely coincidence.  
  
Still, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for Greg to show the thing to his mysteriously appearing and disappearing acquaintance, the man who’d proved himself eerily knowledgeable about strange happenings in parks. The man had somehow held the key to solving the case of the Regent’s Park Robber, so perhaps he would have similar insight about this.  
  
If, that is, Greg could track him down.  
  
~ ~ ~  
  
“All right,” Greg said, loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear him, though he didn’t see anyone around. It was cooler today and overcast, and there weren’t many people about.  
  
He was back in Christchurch Gardens and had spread his lunch out beside him on one of the benches, all the while feeling bizarrely as though he were setting out a decoy for a skittish wild creature.  
  
“All right,” Greg said again. “I know you like lurking about and surprising me with how you come out of nowhere, so I’m going to focus on eating my lunch here, and if you feel like turning up for a chat, well, you’re welcome to.”  
  
He busied himself with his sandwich and crisps – then looked up again to find the pale-eyed man sitting next to him on the bench.  
  
“Holy CHRIST!” Greg shouted, dropping his sandwich to the ground.  
  
The man turned his head and blinked at him. He was still in that same posh coat he seemed to wear no matter the weather. “Oh,” he said. “Did I startle you?”  
  
“Bloody – yes, you startled me.” Greg bent to retrieve his sandwich, grimacing as he brushed bits of gravel from the bread. The slice of tomato had fallen out entirely when the thing had hit the ground and was probably a lost cause.  
  
“I’m…sorry?” The man said it in a quizzical tone, as if he didn’t know what it meant. Hell, he probably didn’t.  
  
“‘S fine,” Greg said, his heart still going a mile a minute. He’d been the one who asked the man to show up, but he’d still startled the hell out of Greg when he did. Greg set the sandwich aside, more important things on his mind. “Look, apparently I trust you, God knows why, and I want you to have a look at something and tell me what you think, all right?”  
  
The man nodded his assent, aloof as always, but Greg was getting to know him a little better and thought he detected eagerness in the man’s posture. Was that why he kept turning up around the Met, because he liked solving mysteries? Or did Greg have it backwards and the man was more dangerous than he looked, someone who liked _creating_ mysteries and making others dance about trying to solve them?  
  
Greg had been reaching for the scrawled-on leaf, where he had it safely stowed inside an evidence bag in his inside jacket pocket, but he paused. “By the way – you’re called Sherlock, is that right?”  
  
The man tensed slightly, hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”  
  
“Sherlock Holmes?”  
  
The change was instantaneous, from cool, collected control to petulant rage. The man’s whole body radiated it, livid where until now he’d always been cold. “Who have you been talking to?” he demanded. And then, before Greg could answer, “ _Mycroft_.”  
  
“Posh bloke with an umbrella?” Greg offered.  
  
“Oh, how tedious,” the man sighed, his eyes fluttering closed as if in great pain. “Interfering git. As if running the entire nation from the comfortable safety of its woodlands weren’t enough, he has to go sticking his stupid long nose into my life as well.”  
  
“Er, right,” Greg said. _Woodlands_? The bloke in the pub had looked like the last person who would want to go camping or even for a walk in the woods. “Anyway,” he said, trying to bring this conversation back on track. “I looked you up and – you don’t exist. No record anywhere. So, is that really your name?”  
  
“It’s _a_ name,” the man murmured.  
  
“An alias? What’s your real name, then, if you don’t mind me asking?” Greg said it with heavy irony, but of course that sailed clear over the man’s head.  
  
“No, I don’t mind. But it isn’t as straightforward a question as you presume, Detective Inspector. This is the name I currently use and you’ll have to make do with that, for I’m not able to provide anything more satisfactory.”  
  
“Bloody hell,” Greg muttered, but he knew he’d let himself in for this. This was what he got for not only accepting but actually seeking out the opinion of some oddball he’d met in Christchurch Gardens on his lunch break. “Fine,” he said, and reached for the evidence bag, drawing it carefully from his pocket. “Sherlock – if I can call you Sherlock. Have a look at this, would you? I went to Hampstead Heath to investigate a series of pet disappearances, and instead I found this.”  
  
The man’s eyes widened and he took the clear plastic evidence bag from Greg with unexpected gentleness, turning it over delicately with deft fingers. “May I open the bag?”  
  
Greg nodded. “Careful, though, hold it by the edges. Can’t be having you getting fingerprints on it.”  
  
The man – Sherlock – slid the leaf gingerly from the bag and held it up to the light. It had dried out slightly since the previous evening, but it was still a luminous green and the words scratched on it were clearer than ever, now that the nearly translucent liquid they were written in had dried.  
  
_Another dog disappeared? Ask tree-boy why._  
  
Sherlock brought the leaf up under his nose and sniffed it.  
  
“Hey –” Greg began to protest, but Sherlock was already sliding the leaf back into the evidence bag and handing it to Greg, who slipped it away to safety in his jacket pocket.  
  
“Spider venom,” Sherlock breathed.  
  
“Say _what_?” said Greg.  
  
“Spider venom! A message – a message intended for me – written in the venom of a spider. Oh, it’s Christmas!”  
  
“Hang on, a message for _you_? How do you know it’s meant for you?”  
  
The man gave him a withering glance. “You brought it to me, did you not? Why else would you do that, unless you knew it was for me?”  
  
“I thought you could – could help figure out what it meant, or something!” Greg protested. “Was I supposed to assume that a message that dropped out of a tree in a park and landed in front of my feet was meant for you?”  
  
“It dropped out of a tree?” Sherlock asked, completely diverted to this new train of thought.  
  
“Yeah – I was walking along under one of those long rows of lime trees, and it fell right down in front of me.”  
  
“Oh, how _nefarious_ ,” Sherlock murmured, but he looked delighted. “He’s using double agents now! Oh, it’s Christmas and Yuletide and Haloa at once.” He turned to Greg suddenly, the full force of that otherworldly gaze pinning him to the bench. “Meet me at Hampstead Heath tonight at midnight.”  
  
“But –!”  
  
“Don’t ask questions, Detective Inspector! No time for that!” He rose from the bench in one fluid movement, that damn gorgeous coat swirling about his legs. “Meet me at the park at midnight, Inspector. The _game_ is _on_!”


	3. Chapter 3

Against all better judgement, 11:45 that evening found Greg parking his car near the park, locking it behind him with a beep of the electronic key and plunging once again into the depths of Hampstead Heath, now quiet and dark.  
  
He passed through a border of trees, across one of the wide, grassy areas, and into the trees again. High overhead, a slim sickle moon made brief and occasional appearances, darting out from behind scudding clouds before slipping away again. Sherlock had made it sound as if he would simply come and find Greg once he got here, so he supposed he had to trust that it would happen. Just stand in the middle of a meadow somewhere and expect Sherlock to turn up.  
  
_Mad_ , Greg thought, meaning himself, not Sherlock. Though perhaps it applied in both cases.  
  
The ground sloped gently upwards as the woods gave way to a meadow. Long grass swished under Greg’s feet, the sound overly loud with the absence of the usual daytime noises to mask it. Framed by the lights of London that shone beyond the park’s borders, trees loomed out of the shadows as fantastical shapes, dark giants’ fingers clawing at the sky. A night breeze whispered and moaned through the high branches. If ever anywhere in London were a fitting place to find Greg’s strange acquaintance, this surely was it. Greg stopped in the middle of the grass and looked around.  
  
Sherlock loomed out of the darkness a few yards away, more dramatic than ever with his pale face luminous in the darkness, framed by the sharply upturned collars of his long coat. His dark curls were wild, and he looked very much in his element. He beckoned to Greg, and set off again at an angle from the direction Greg had been heading, leaving Greg to hurry after.  
  
“Good, you came,” Sherlock tossed brusquely over his shoulder. He didn’t seem to have ‘got the hang of’ greetings either, as the mysterious bloke in the pub might put it. “We have to find his lair, and based on the evidence, I’m certain it’s somewhere in this park. Have you got a torch, Detective Inspector? I won’t need one, but you may want it.”  
  
“Hang on,” Greg protested, keeping pace with the retreating swirl of Sherlock’s coat. ‘Hang on’ was something he seemed to be saying a lot lately. “ _Whose_ lair? What are we looking for, exactly? If you want me to help you do this, the bare minimum would be telling me what ‘this’ is.”  
  
“Jim Moriarty,” Sherlock intoned in a dramatic, deep rumble. He actually stopped moving for a moment, to render his pronouncement all the more theatrical, then plunged on towards the next patch of woods.  
  
“Who’s Jim Moriarty?” Greg demanded, pulling out his pocket torch and switching it on, so he wouldn’t trip over the patchwork of roots protruding from the ground. “Is he our suspect? Talk to me, Sherlock.”  
  
“He’s the spider,” Sherlock cried, still a couple paces ahead, dodging between trees. “The spider that sits motionless at the centre of the web, and knows well every quiver of each of its strands.”  
  
“Okay, so he’s…a criminal? Who’s like a spider?” Greg asked, trying desperately to follow Sherlock’s careening train of thought.  
  
Sherlock turned, still moving, and gave Greg that blank stare that suggested astonishment that anyone could be so slow.  
  
“No,” Sherlock said, “he _is_ a spider. Do try to keep up.”  
  
And with that, he plunged away into the woods at such speed that Greg had to concentrate all his energy on keeping pace.  
  
He’d never realised Hampstead Heath contained such deep and tangled woods. For all its size, the park had always struck him as genteel and well maintained, more cricket pitch than primeval thicket. In fact, Greg no longer recognised anything around them, as they delved ever deeper into the labyrinth of close-set trees. Barely any city light reached them now, and Greg was relying on his torch to find his footing.  
  
“Sherlock,” Greg called to the retreating dark line of Sherlock’s back, barely glimpsed through the tree trunks ahead. “Wait up, would you? We don’t want to go getting separated.”  
  
Sherlock made a puff of noise that probably meant annoyance, but Greg chose to ignore it. When it came down to it, wasn’t this his investigation? His investigation and his extremely unusual confidential informant taking him…they hadn’t even properly established where Sherlock was taking him.  
  
Greg slowed to a jog as he caught up to where Sherlock stood, radiating impatience.  
  
“Look,” Greg said, “I know you get off on this whole being-mysterious thing, but I’ve got to follow some modicum of police procedure here. We’re looking for someone you think may have had something to do with that odd leaf I found, right? And you think he might also have something to do with the dogs that have gone missing?”  
  
“Dogs, yes, for now,” Sherlock snapped, setting off again, though this time at a more reasonable pace. “But he won’t be satisfied with dogs for long.”  
  
The beam of Greg’s torch bounced eerily off of the tree trunks as they passed. “What are you saying? You think he’s going to start abducting…people?”  
  
“One never knows,” Sherlock intoned darkly. “He recurs and recurs, a nightmare spanning across history. His agents are numerous and splendidly organised. He does little himself, he only plans. He was in Troy at the time of the War, scheming to sow discord. They say he sailed with Mark Antony, that he built his lair at Camlann. The tales of the spider are thousandfold.”  
  
Greg, still walking, was staring agog at Sherlock, and nearly tripped over a root. He’d never heard the man so focused, and the intent in Sherlock’s voice made Greg shiver. He’d known Sherlock to be amusing in his petulant dramatics, but now he was impressive in a much darker way. In the alluring flow of words that poured forth in that gorgeous deep baritone, the impossibility of what the man was saying almost passed Greg by.  
  
_He was in Troy, he built his lair at Camlann…_  
  
Greg opened his mouth to say, “What rubbish are you talking, mate?” but at that moment a flash of pearly white, something like the brilliant flank of a horse the colour of fallen snow, and with it something long that tapered to a sharp point, barely glimpsed between distant trees, distracted him and instead Greg exclaimed, before his brain could catch up with his mouth, “Was that a _unicorn_?”  
  
Beside him, Sherlock smirked and didn’t reply.  
  
Obviously, it hadn’t been a unicorn. Probably a discarded plastic bag that had got caught in the branches of a tree, creating a flash of strange brightness when caught momentarily in the light.  
  
The non-existent light, since Greg’s torch had been pointed the other way.  
  
Right.  
  
Though they’d walked a mile at most, the London Greg knew felt suddenly very far away.  
  
But he hadn’t seen a unicorn. The man beside him wasn’t stalking an ancient enemy who might or might not be a literal spider and who was known to ‘recur and recur’ throughout history’s great battles. Obviously all of this was very silly, and Sherlock was having him on, and Greg was going to feel very embarrassed tomorrow, or whenever Sherlock finally admitted it had all been a prank. Probably he’d planted that leaf, too, for Greg to find. Clearly, the man was a little unhinged or had too much time on his hands or both. Clearly he –  
  
In front of them, the woods opened out into a little dell, the ground dipping away in front of their feet. Sherlock stopped at its edge so suddenly, Greg stumbled into his back. Sherlock hissed, “Shhh!”  
  
Greg snorted in return, not to be outdone in the surly-git department. “Well, sorry, mate, but you –”  
  
Sherlock spun towards him, pale eyes shining in the gloom of the woods. “Do you trust me?” he demanded, an urgent whisper.  
  
Greg gazed into those luminous eyes and fought the urge to agree unconditionally. Instead, he retorted, “No, are you daft? I don’t even know you!”  
  
Sherlock seemed to flutter with impatience. “Well, _try_ , then, won’t you? Your life may depend on it.”  
  
Greg opened his mouth to protest, but Sherlock’s hand appeared out of the darkness to cover it, stopping him from speaking. Sherlock’s skin was surprisingly warm, for how pale and otherworldly he looked.  
  
“Listen,” Sherlock hissed. “He’s here, I can sense him. You can just see his web sparkling in the darkness down there, or maybe you can’t with your puny human eyes, I don’t know. Don’t answer that, there isn’t time. I need you to stay here. Don’t follow me, don’t try to engage him. He’s too dangerous, and he can’t be fought with the weapons you’re used to. Just wait for me here, and if I don’t come back, _run_.”  
  
“Oh, no,” Greg countered, shrugging away from Sherlock’s muffling hand. “You’re a civilian, I’m not letting you –”  
  
But Sherlock was gone, in the usual swirl of dark coat and flying curls.  
  
“ _Bugger_ ,” Greg groaned, and plunged after him into the night.


	4. Chapter 4

Once Greg came close enough to see it, the spider web did indeed sparkle in what little moonlight was able to wrestle its way free of the cloud cover overhead and shine down on the grassy dell that nestled here in the cradle of the dark, quiet woods. Greg had definitely never seen this bit of the park.  
  
No earthly spider could have spun the web that lay before him. It stretched clear across the dell, at least thirty yards across. Greg stepped closer and touched a finger to one of its outermost strands, which stretched from a tree at the edge of the dell into the labyrinthine heart of the web. The strand was sticky to the touch, and Greg felt the reverberation travel through it, away from him and back again, before he jerked his hand away.   
  
He didn’t see any giant spider – not that he’d expected to – but in the faint light, Greg could make out large, dark, inert forms scattered across the web, just as dead flies might look immobilised in the silken threads of a real spider’s web, but on a grotesque and enormous scale.  
  
But this was not a giant spider web, those were not enormous mutant flies, and there was going to be real-world explanation for all this. Somehow.  
  
Somewhere close by, a dog whined. And Greg saw with horror that one of the dark, immobilised lumps was still moving, struggling feebly where it lay bound in the sticky web.  
  
The dog whined again, high and piteous and scared.  
  
“Damn it,” Greg said aloud. Because he hadn’t come here to rescue some dog that had blundered into a spider’s web – blundered into something that _looked_ like a spider’s web, he corrected himself, because no matter how it looked this was not actually the web of a giant spider – but now that he was here, of course he couldn’t ignore it.  
  
Greg studied the web, assessing how he could navigate from where he stood at its edge to the dark, shivering lump that was the dog. The strands of the web were sparser towards the edges but strung ever more closely together nearer to its centre, too close to walk between. They were not quite rope-like in thickness, too thin to walk and balance on, too high off the ground to easily jump over. But they all lay in roughly the same plane, about three feet off the ground. Perhaps he could pass underneath, by ducking beneath and between the threads.  
  
Greg sighed, gripped his torch in one hand, and ducked beneath the first strand, carefully keeping his head below its level, so as not to get caught by its gluey length. So far so good. Carefully ducking and dodging, he made his piecemeal way forwards, zigging and zagging, lifting his head up into the small open spaces between the sticky strands to assess his progress.   
  
As he got closer, Greg could see that the dog had the long, shaggy fur of a red setter. It was impossible to tell colour in the faint moonlight, but the size and shape of the dog seemed right for a setter. It whiffled softly in greeting as Greg approached, only a dozen feet separating them now, and attempted weakly to wag its tail. The dog lay on its side, suspended in the web and bound from shoulder to rump in the sticky, ropy strands. The web vibrated ominously as it tried to move.  
  
No – that vibration wasn’t coming from the dog.  
  
Something huge and nightmarish and black was approaching across the web, something with too many legs, sharp-edged pincers and darkly glittering eyes that caught all of the scant moonlight and reflected it back, its gaze malevolent and fixed on Greg. The creature moved with strange, jerky motions, picking its way with disconcerting speed as it moved side to side and forwards along the interconnected strands of the web, towards Greg and the dog that lay, struggling, between them.  
  
“Get away!” Greg shouted, for all the good shouting would do. He shoved his torch out of the way into a jacket pocket and plunged forwards, flinging himself down at the ground and moving at the fastest possible crawl towards the trapped dog, determined that if nothing else, he’d get to the dog before that nightmare-thing did.   
  
The rough ground scratched Greg’s palms as he half-ran, half-crawled under and through the web – towards the dog, towards the massive spider, towards danger, because he couldn’t do otherwise, not when faced with a threat like that. He just hoped Sherlock had got away to somewhere safe.   
  
Greg swore as his head brushed against a strand of the web and he had to tear his hair free of its gluey hold as he scrambled on.   
  
The night around him had taken on a nightmare quality, faint lights glinting strangely, sounds weirdly amplified, the swish of the monster’s long legs audible as it approached, the dog’s high, desperate whine sharp in Greg’s ears, but he was almost there, had almost reached the dog where it struggled against its bindings near an unusually slim oak tree that protruded up out of the ground between two strands of the web, which was funny because Greg didn’t remember seeing any trees in the dell when he’d viewed it from above –  
  
“Get out of here!” Sherlock shouted, and it was Sherlock there, not a tree, of course it was Sherlock, standing lithe and tall in his long coat, a dark outline against the dark sky, then Sherlock was bending over the struggling dog and tearing at the spider silk that bound it. “Get out!” Sherlock cried again. “It’s too dangerous here for mortals, Inspector, just go!”   
  
The monstrous spider was mere feet away, but Sherlock, in some superhuman feat of strength, tore apart the last of the threads that bound the dog. He lifted the animal, which was shaking with fear, free of the sticky web and set it gently down on the ground below.  
  
“Go,” Greg heard Sherlock whisper in the dog’s floppy ear, in a voice warmer and more tender than Greg would have thought possible from a man so cool and strange. “Go on, run home, _go_.”  
  
The dog gave a yelp, tottered at first on its legs after so long immobile, then found its balance and ran, just as Sherlock had told it to do, streaked away under the strands of the web and up to the rim of the dell, and then it was gone into the woods.   
  
Greg turned his head for the briefest moment to watch the dog make it away to safety, and in that moment the monster loomed up behind him and a breathy voice at his ear said, “Hi!”  
  
Greg spun and found the monstrous spider staring straight down at him with all eight of its darkly glinting eyes, its sharp pincers waving in and out. It perched delicately, its eight legs balanced across several different threads of its web, a visitation out of a nightmare, something primeval, something horrible and wrong.  
  
“You’re _dishy_ ,” the monster cooed. “Oh, yes, I like this one! I think I’ll keep you. I’d like to devour you, right down to your heart. Ah!” The spider made an odd, agitated clicking noise and seemed to dance on all eight of its legs, the web undulating weirdly beneath its weight. “Yes, oh, yes, I do like pets, so touchingly loyal, but this one’s even better. Sexy. I think I’ll keep him. Thank you for this present, Sherlock, thank you.”  
  
“He’s not for you,” Sherlock snapped, and he was suddenly there beside Greg, only one thin strand of the web separating them. Sherlock stared up into the spider’s hairy face, standing impossibly tall and undaunted by this nightmare apparition. “And London’s not for you, either, come to that. Get out, Moriarty. This is not your battleground.”  
  
The spider clicked, a noise Greg felt bizarrely certain was its way of laughing.  
  
“Oh, Sherlock Holmes,” it said. “Sherlock, Holmes, whatever name you wear these days. I’ve loved this, this little game of ours, chasing each other across human history. They’re so darling, aren’t they, humans? Love how gullible they are. Anyway. The point is, you don’t want me to go away! How could you play the hero without me? Every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain. And what could possibly fit better than a monster in the deep, dark woods, huh, Sherlock? You need me. You _want_ me. You’re my reason to stay.”  
  
Sherlock cut his eyes sideways to Greg, and with a shock of realisation, Greg saw that Sherlock was tempted. Whatever this creature was, whatever _Sherlock_ was, he was tempted by the macabre narrative this monster spun, by its appeal to Sherlock’s love of the dramatic.   
  
“First, though,” the spider drawled, “we’ll have to get rid of your pet. Police detective, isn’t he? Hope he’s as tasty as he looks.”   
  
Lightning fast, two of the legs snapped down and pinned Greg between them, lifting him up until he was suspended high above the web.   
  
“No!” Sherlock shouted.  
  
The spider’s legs were cold and hairy and hard and impossibly strong. Greg struggled to no avail, then gave up struggling in favour of frantic planning. This thing had to have a weak spot. Fairy tale monsters always had a weak spot, didn’t they?  
  
“It was nice to meet you,” the spider purred, all of its eyes fixed on Greg. “But we both knew it couldn’t last, didn’t we? I’m a monster and I’m soooo changeable.”  
  
“Final warning,” Sherlock growled from the ground below them. “ _Put him down._ ”  
  
“Or you’ll do what?” The spider laughed that same strange, high clicking sound, its legs clamping even harder around Greg’s abdomen. “You’ll sneer at me? You’ll weep sad little tears over your human friend? I thought you were better than that, Sherlock. I thought you were like me, but you’re ordinary, aren’t you?”   
  
“Never!” Sherlock shouted, and he threw back his head and made the strangest sound Greg had ever heard, an eerie, wailing, high-pitched shriek, like a bird’s cry if a bird were trying to summon a denizen of the land of the dead. Greg’s head pulsed and ached with the sound, something surely human ears were never meant to hear.  
  
An answering cry came from above, and something dived down out of the darkness in a riot of feathers and claws.  
  
“Go for the eyes!” Greg heard Sherlock cry out. “You like shiny things, don’t you? Go for the eyes!”  
  
The spider screamed in panic and dropped Greg, who fell, hard, to the ground. He landed in an awkward half-roll, slapping his arms to the ground to break the worst of the impact, but still catching the back of his skull against the rocky ground.  
  
Winded, bright bursts of light splashing across his vision, Greg only half saw what came next – a feathery creature with a human face diving at the spider, clawed talons outstretched; the spider rearing back in fear, striking out wildly with its forelimbs, scissoring its pincers in the air.   
  
The winged thing rose, circling to make another pass, and with it momentarily out of reach the spider thrust its pincers at Sherlock instead, except was it a tree standing there where Sherlock had been? The spider’s pincers were like great axes, slamming into the tree trunk from both sides, and someone screamed, a horrible rending noise of pain, and Greg’s vision blurred to black as somewhere above him the spider roared and the bird-thing screamed and dived.


	5. Chapter 5

Greg came to with a sick headache pulsing in his head.  
  
“Erggh…Sherlock,” he mumbled.  
  
“Here,” came a weak voice nearby.  
  
Greg’s eyes snapped open. “Sherlock!”  
  
Where Greg could have sworn there’d been a half-felled tree when last he’d looked, Sherlock now lay on the ground. Even in dimness of the dell, Greg could see dark blood staining the crisp white shirt Sherlock wore beneath his coat.  
  
“Bloody hell!” Greg shoved himself to his feet, groaning at the spinning in his head, and stumbled towards Sherlock, ducking down between the sticky strands of the web that separated them. He fell to his knees at Sherlock’s side, fumbling his shirt open to assess his wounds. “God, Sherlock, we have to get you to hospital, need to see if I can get mobile reception out here –”  
  
“Hudders,” Sherlock mumbled. Then, louder: “No hospital, they’re for mortals, take me to – Mrs Hudson.”  
  
“Mrs Hudson? Who the hell is that?”  
  
“Just through the woods,” Sherlock said faintly. “Not far. Trust me…”  
  
And Greg, because he had clearly lost all common sense the day he met Sherlock Holmes, did trust him. He got his arms under Sherlock’s shoulders and levered him up from the ground as best he could. Sherlock groaned and cursed, but managed eventually to get his feet under him and stand. Together they made their slow and painful way out through the web and up to the lip of the grassy dell.  
  
“Just that way,” Sherlock mumbled, nodding vaguely into the woods ahead of them. “Doesn’ much matter which direction, ‘s the intention that matters…”  
  
“Right,” Greg grumbled, “because that makes a lot of sense.”  
  
But he hooked his arm more firmly under Sherlock’s armpits and half-led, half-dragged him onwards through the dark woods that smelled earthy and strange, redolent with the musk of leaf litter, onwards through the lurking shapes of half-seen trees that formed a treacherous maze of low-hanging branches and protruding roots that Greg had to see Sherlock safely through.  
  
It was most likely mere minutes that they struggled through the woods together, but it felt an eternity, with Sherlock slumped heavily into Greg’s arm and Greg hyperaware with every step they took that Sherlock was still bleeding, that Sherlock could die here in these peaceful woods amidst the tranquil scents of leaves and wildflowers and the rustlings of small night creatures in the underbrush. That he might die and it would be Greg who had failed him.  
  
“Oh, _Sherlock_!” a voice cried out of the darkness ahead of them. A warm, motherly voice, the kind of voice that promised fussing and competent care and possibly tea.  
  
Greg, who’d had his eyes down, focused on keeping his and Sherlock’s feet moving in the right direction, looked up and – his brain stuttered to a stop.  
  
He’d grudgingly accepted the existence of the giant spider, and he’d watched the spider do battle with some winged creature Greg was sure was not supposed to exist in this world. He was also not stupid, and was willing to concede that it was very unlikely Sherlock was human, either. But this beast in front of him –  
  
“She’s a griffin,” Sherlock grumbled beside him. “Body of a lion, head and wings of an eagle, known for guarding riches and treasure. Mrs Hudson, specifically, guards the riches of ancient London, and no, I can’t tell you what those are, because yes, I really would have to kill you. Now, would you stop gawping so we can continue?”  
  
“Oh, Sherlock,” the griffin repeated, hurrying towards them with fluttery steps, surprisingly light on its feet for such a large creature. Its wings waved in dismay, and Greg’s poor abused brain wondered how he could possibly know so clearly that those wing motions meant that particular emotion. “What have you done to yourself, you silly boy?”  
  
“Nothing you can’t fix, Mrs Hudson,” Sherlock muttered between gritted teeth.  
  
The griffin slid Sherlock from Greg’s arms with its – her? – forelegs and laid him down on a patch of moss, making “tsk tsk” noises.  
  
“Oh, Sherlock, when your brother hears about this, he’ll be so worried…” she fussed, as she deftly flipped open Sherlock’s coat and shirt with her claws, revealing the gaping wounds at both sides of his torso.  
  
“Yes, well, he doesn’t need to know unless someone decides to tell him, does he?” Sherlock snapped, his face pale in the wan moonlight that filtered through the trees. Greg wondered how much blood he’d lost.  
  
Mrs Hudson – and incidentally, how, how, and why did a bloody griffin end up with a name like ‘Mrs Hudson’? – leaned her beak down close to Sherlock, ignoring his petulance. She turned her head this way and that, examining him out of each of her beady eyes in turn.  
  
Finally she sat back on her lion-like haunches and regarded Sherlock shrewdly. “I can heal you, dear, but wouldn’t you rather transform back first? Less painful if you’re not the sort of thing that’s got nerve endings.”  
  
Sherlock grimaced at her in a way that might have seemed threatening if he hadn’t been lying flat on the ground while doing it. “This will be fine, Mrs Hudson. My…human companion doesn’t know about the…other thing.”  
  
_Is the other thing the one where apparently you’re sometimes a tree?_ Greg thought, but decided this wasn’t really the time to be interjecting with his own curiosity.  
  
Mrs Hudson bent low over Sherlock, intoning strings of words in a low murmur, tracing shapes in the air above his chest with her claws. Spells? Incantations? Nothing would surprise Greg anymore. It sounded like Greek, both figuratively in the ‘it’s all Greek to me’ sense, and also literally.  
  
Greg let himself sink down to the soft, mossy ground in relief that Sherlock wasn’t going to die, nobody had to die, and he let his eyes drift closed to the sound of Mrs Hudson’s continued incantations.  
  
He startled back to alertness at the strange sensation of a claw tapping him on the shoulder.  
  
“He’s healing now,” the griffin said above him. “Poor boy. Always getting himself into all sorts of trouble. But he’ll sleep it off and be just fine. Now come have a bit of a kip, too, young man, you look all tuckered out. I’ll make you up a nice bed.”  
  
Mumbling his thanks, Greg stumbled to his feet and followed Mrs Hudson over to where Sherlock lay on his patch of moss. Sweat-soaked curls were plastered to his forehead and his white shirt was torn and bloodied beyond repair, but he was sleeping peacefully. He wasn’t even wounded. From what Greg could see of Sherlock’s torso through the ruined shirt, his injuries had vanished.  
  
After everything else Greg had seen tonight that was patently impossible, he didn’t even ask.  
  
“Go on, make yourself comfortable,” Mrs Hudson was saying. “Plenty of moss here for two. I’ll go back to my perch once you’re settled, but you bed down here with Sherlock. Nothing will harm you in my patch of the woods.”  
  
Greg didn’t protest; after this strange night, a nice bed of moss sounded heavenly rather than bizarre. A gently breathing Sherlock close by his side didn’t sound so bad either.  
  
Greg lowered his aching body to the ground beside Sherlock. Mrs Hudson fussed overhead, her great wings and limbs working in tandem to spread Sherlock’s big coat over both them. The coat fell around Greg’s shoulders, a wonderful, comforting weight.  
  
“Sleep well, young mortal man,” Mrs Hudson murmured, and Greg thought he heard her whisper even more quietly, “How lucky Sherlock is to have you.”  
  
Then he was asleep and knew no more.  
  
~ ~ ~  
  
Greg awoke in the woods for a second time to find morning sunlight slanting through the trees and Sherlock sitting up, ruined shirt gathered regally about his shoulders, watching Greg with those strange, pale eyes.  
  
“Arng,” Greg grunted, which was not the most eloquent way to start a morning, but the sight of Sherlock boring into him with his eyes had startled him.  
  
Greg struggled to a sitting position, pulling with him Sherlock’s coat that had served as their blanket during the night, and wrapping it around himself. He opened and closed his eyes a few times, trying to get the world into focus. The soft golden light pouring over Sherlock’s bright face was painfully beautiful, and made it a little hard to think.  
  
Still fixing him with that unnerving, unblinking stare, Sherlock said, “Okay, you’ve got questions.”  
  
Greg swallowed experimentally, and found his throat and voice in working order. The pain in his head was gone, too. For some reason the first thing that came out of his mouth was, “The Regent’s Park Robber, that wasn’t just a bird, was it?”  
  
“Nope.” Sherlock popped the ‘p’ loudly. “Harpy.”  
  
“ _Harpy_?”  
  
Now Sherlock did blink at him. “After everything you’ve seen, you’re going to be surprised about the harpy?”  
  
“No… No, sorry. Not surprised, just – not completely awake yet. So, it was – when you told me to look for something that attacked from above, that’s because you knew the thing stealing people’s watches and mobiles was a _harpy_.”  
  
“Yep.” Same exaggerated _pop_. “Dumb as posts, but they’re sometimes useful. I assume you’ll have noticed I summoned the same harpy to attack Moriarty last night.”  
  
“Yeah, about that…” Greg paused and took a couple moments to draw his wits about him. Sat up straighter. “Just to recap: Last night, we tracked down the lair of some giant, mythical spider that you’ve been fighting throughout centuries of history, and that for whatever reason had built its latest web in Hampstead Heath. And has been stealing and eating local pets.”  
  
“Well…not quite ‘in’ Hampstead Heath, because in fact Moriarty bends space slightly around himself and expands it to suit his purposes, so while the space he occupied was technically within the bounds of the park, to say that he was ‘in’ Hampstead Heath –”  
  
“But the rest is more or less correct, yes?” Greg cut him off, not sure how much of the metaphysics lesson he would be able to absorb before coffee.  
  
“More or less, yes.”  
  
“And you are…?”  
  
He expected Sherlock to take the hint and fill in the rest of the sentence but, right, Sherlock didn’t do social cues. Greg tried again. “What are you, Sherlock?”  
  
“I?” Sherlock looked surprised, as if this part were so obvious that Greg shouldn’t have had to ask. “I’m a dryad.”  
  
“You’re a _dryad_?" Greg spluttered. “Aren’t those, uh, beautiful young maidens who live in trees and frolic around in the woods?” _Not blokes who turn_ into _trees at the drop of a hat._  
  
Sherlock turned an affronted frown on Greg. “Whom would you rather trust as the authority on the subject: I, who in fact _am_ a dryad, or something you read on Wikipedia?”  
  
Greg opened his mouth to protest that he was a detective, thank you very much, and perfectly capable of doing research beyond the level of treating Wikipedia as a primary source, then closed his mouth again. Some battles weren’t worth fighting.  
  
“Ooh-ooh!” a voice trilled.  
  
Mrs Hudson bounded out from behind the trees and leapt to a stop in front of them, beaming. That is, if a creature that had a beak rather than a mouth could be said to be beaming. But somehow Greg rather fancied that was precisely what she was doing.  
  
“Oh, Sherlock, you look so much better,” Mrs Hudson enthused. “You do heal up well, don’t you? Even in human form, and that’s no small feat. And your young man is looking sprightly again, too – you were a little ragged last night, luv, after tangling with that nasty spider. Sleeping out of doors does wonders, you know, wonders. Ooh, my hip used to give me such trouble in those years I spent pretending to be a statue in a library, but it’s all cleared up now that I’ve taken to sleeping out of doors again.”  
  
Greg glanced at Sherlock, and was surprised to catch a trace of humour lurking around his lips. So the man did have a sense of the absurd, despite being rather absurd himself. At least as absurd as a chatty griffin with a razor-sharp beak and a bad hip.  
  
That little smile did wonderful things for Sherlock’s usually austere mien, and Greg couldn’t help but smile back.  
  
Then he tore his eyes from Sherlock’s beguiling expression and said, “By the way…” Greg hated to break the convivial atmosphere, but he did have a duty to the public if there was a mythical monster on the loose. “Speaking of the spider… Is it still here in the woods somewhere? Because if it is, it’s a menace to the public, I’ll have to get an armed unit out here –” Greg broke off, because Sherlock was shaking his head. “No?”  
  
“Moriarty’s gone,” Sherlock said tersely. “He fears harpies – one of the only things he fears. They always aim for the eyes, and his eyes are his weak point. He won’t be back, not here, anyway, not for now.”  
  
“That’s good news.” Greg took another look at Sherlock’s face. “…So why do you look like it’s not?”  
  
“I should have stopped him!” Sherlock burst out, curls flying wildly as he shook his head vigorously in frustration. “Each time, I’m able to hold him in check, but I’m never able to stop him for good!”  
  
Mrs Hudson, who’d settled down comfortably onto her haunches, tutted. “Sherlock, dear, you mustn’t go thinking you have to solve all the world’s problems at once. After all, you’re only human.” She turned to Greg and added conversationally, “Well, strictly speaking, of course, he’s not human, but you know what I mean.”  
  
“Yes, Mrs Hudson, I’ve told him about that. You’re behind the times,” Sherlock snapped.  
  
“Oh, how lovely!” Mrs Hudson trilled, immune as always to Sherlock’s flights of rudeness. “You’ve seen all these strange doings that a mortal oughtn’t to see, and yet you’re still here. Isn’t our Sherlock a lucky boy to have you.”  
  
“Mrs Hudson, we’re not –” Greg began, then stopped. Were they? He glanced at Sherlock, and was treated to the most surprising sight of all in this long, strange night: The faintest hint of a blush was creeping up Sherlock’s neck, tingeing that beautiful, cold face with emotion.  
  
Suddenly, Greg very much wanted to know if Sherlock’s lips were as unexpectedly warm as the touch of his hand had been.  
  
“Er,” he coughed, covering his interrupted sentence. “We’re not…going to be able to stay much longer, unfortunately. I need to get back, because believe it or not, at the Met it’s going to be just another normal working day. And I thought Sherlock…might want to come with me?”  
  
A wonderful array of emotions chased themselves across Sherlock’s normally aloof face. There were doubt and hope and suspicion as he wondered whether he’d understood Greg correctly, then a growing, smug satisfaction as Sherlock determined that, yes, he’d understood.  
  
Greg stood, feeling the aches of the tumble he’d taken to the ground last night, though not as badly as he’d feared. He slid Sherlock’s coat from his own shoulders and held it out.  
  
“Here, you’ll probably want this back.”  
  
Sherlock rose from the ground, graceful as ever, as if he’d never been mortally wounded. He shook his head. “You wear it for now. It…suits you?” He cocked his head at Greg, as if to confirm that this was in fact the correct phrasing.  
  
Greg grinned. “Yeah, ta.” He draped the long coat, which indeed felt as luxurious as it looked, back around his shoulders and held out his hand to Sherlock. “Come on, then. I have a very bizarre story I need to edit into a form my Detective Sergeant will believe when I get to work today, and you might as well help.”  
  
Sherlock stared down at the offered hand, then up at Greg. Greg wiggled his fingers, and Sherlock caught on. He stepped forwards and grasped the hand in his own, those lovely, long fingers wrapping around Greg’s.  
  
_He’s a tree,_ Greg thought in bafflement and wonder. _All those times when I thought he seemed strange, or alien, or just really bloody…tall and gorgeous, it’s because he’s a bloody tree._ Greg decided that when he was a little less sleep-deprived, he would return to examining this fact in much more detail.  
  
For now, he was going to enjoy the feeling of Sherlock’s hand in his, and damn the rest of it.  
  
To Mrs Hudson, who rose from her seated position to her full lion-ish height – and that was never not going to be slightly alarming – Greg said, “Thank you so much for your help last night. Sherlock might have died if it weren’t for you, and apparently he’s not well versed in thank-yous, so I’ll say it for him. Thank you, Mrs Hudson.”  
  
Sherlock had begun to squawk indignantly at that idea that he’d ever been in danger of dying, but Greg squeezed his hand and he subsided.  
  
“Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure,” Mrs Hudson beamed, though again, it didn’t seem as though beaming should have been possible for someone with a beak. Greg had turned to go, Sherlock’s hand warm in his, when Mrs Hudson exclaimed, “Oh, Sherlock, shame on you, you never even told me your young man’s name!”  
  
Greg turned again, in time to witness an exquisite display of Sherlock rendered speechless.  
  
Greg burst out laughing. “You don’t know my name, do you? All of this, and you never bothered to learn my name.”  
  
He laughed so hard, he thought his legs might fold underneath him, and the impatient consternation with which Sherlock was regarding him only made Greg laugh harder. In mere days, his life had gone from normal to _this_.  
  
And he wouldn’t change it. He didn’t want to change a thing.  
  
“Greg,” he said, when he could finally speak again. “My name is Greg. And don’t forget it, all right? You may change names as it suits your whim, but that one’s mine for the duration, and I’m sticking with it. Now, come on. You’ve vanquished your spider nemesis for now, but there are a thousand other criminals you could be helping me catch. Fancy solving some mysteries?”  
  
Sherlock favoured Greg with what Greg had come to recognise as a very rare, but very genuine, smile. And they walked together through the park in the softly slanting morning sunlight, out of the woods and back into mortal, everyday London.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some thoughts on the mythology I have borrowed (and mangled?) here:
> 
> …Yes, dryads are meant to be nymphs that live IN trees, not nymphs that can transform INTO trees, and the trees themselves are not meant to be able to move around. Also, nymphs are supposed to be all female. Clearly I have taken liberties!
> 
> But tradition had dryads and other nymphs as long-lived (they don’t die of old age or illness, but are not necessarily immortal) and the specific type of dryads that lived in oak trees could die if the tree they lived in was killed – so all that is “true” for this Sherlock.
> 
> Haloa, which Sherlock mentions, was a Greek festival held after the harvest, in mid-winter. It seems to me this Sherlock’s reference points would be a mix of modern British culture, ancient British/Celtic Paganism, and classical Greek mythology, which is why he refers to “Christmas and Yuletide and Haloa.”
> 
> Oh, but I added the stuff about harpies liking shiny objects – that’s not actually a thing.
> 
> Story title from John Keat’s “Ode to Psyche,” specifically this bit:
> 
>  
> 
> _Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees_  
>  _Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;_  
>  _And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,_  
>  _The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;_  
>  _And in the midst of this wide quietness_  
>  _A rosy sanctuary will I dress_  
>  _With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,_  
>  _With buds, and bells, and stars without a name…_


End file.
